Biden: Republicans had ‘epiphany’ on immigration – Vice President Joe Biden said Republicans have had a major realization in their approach to immigration reform in recent weeks.”Have you ever seen a time when Republicans have had a more rapid epiphany about immigration than they have this last election?” Biden said Thursday while speaking at an event for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington.

There’s No ‘I’ in ‘Kumbaya’ – A Uniquely Polarizing President – We’re all talking about Republicans on the Hill and their manifold failures. So here are some things President Obama didn’t do during the fiscal cliff impasse and some conjecture as to why.He won but he did not triumph. His victory didn’t resolve or ease anything and heralds nothing but more congressional war to come.

He did not unveil, argue for or put on the table the outlines of a grand bargain. That is, he put no force behind solutions to the actual crisis facing our country, which is the hemorrhagic spending that threatens our future. Progress there—even just a little—would have heartened almost everyone. The president won on tax hikes, but that was an emotional, symbolic and ideological victory, not a substantive one. The higher rates will do almost nothing to ease the debt or deficits.

Charles Krauthammer: Return of the real Obama – The rout was complete, the retreat disorderly. President Obama got his tax hikes — naked of spending cuts — passed by the ostensibly Republican House of Representatives. After which, you might expect him to pivot to his self-proclaimed “principle” of fiscal “balance” by taking the lead on reducing spending. “Why,” asked The Post on the eve of the final fiscal-cliff agreement, “is the nation’s leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?”Because he has no interest in them. He’s a visionary, not an accountant. Sure, he’ll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for reelection. But now that he’s past the post, he’s free to be himself — a committed big-government social democrat.

Boehner reelected as Speaker; nine Republicans defect in vote – Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) was reelected Speaker of the House on Thursday after a week of rumors of a possible GOP revolt.Boehner won a bare majority in a vote that saw nine Republicans vote for other GOP members, and several others who abstained from voting or voted “present.” Two years ago, Boehner won all 241 available GOP votes.

Does Eric Cantor’s no vote on the fiscal cliff bill spell trouble for John Boehner? – It’s rare for the top two members of the House leadership to split on an important vote. Bob Michel, the hapless leader of the House Republicans during a long period in the minority, and Newt Gingrich voted differently on the 1990 “read my lips” tax increase. They split again over the 1994 assault weapons ban.Even less common is a House speaker and majority leader going their separate ways on big-ticket legislation. The last major example is when the Democratic-controlled House debated funding President George W Bush’s surge in Iraq. House speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed the measure to proceed to the floor and voted no. House majority leader Steny Hoyer voted yes.House speakers typically don’t even vote at all unless it is necessary to break a tie. So it may have been a clarifying moment when speaker of the House John Boehner and House majority leader Eric Cantor parted ways on the deal that ended the long national nightmare known as the fiscal cliff. Boehner voted for the bipartisan agreement negotiated between Vice-President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; Cantor breathed the final moments of life into the opposition.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Only Whetted Obama’s Appetite for More Taxes – Taxes: Anyone who thinks the fiscal cliff deal will end President Obama’s soak-the-rich campaign isn’t paying attention. Even before the ink had dried on his $620 billion tax hike, Obama was talking up his desire for more.Obama hinted at this on Sunday on “Meet the Press,” when he told David Gregory that “you are not only going to cut your way to prosperity” and that “one of the fallacies” was that “deficit reduction is only a matter of cutting programs.”But as the fiscal cliff agreement looked increasingly likely, Obama started talking more specifically about additional tax hikes. On Monday, he told a White House rally that “revenues have to be part of the equation in turning off the sequester.”

Translation: If Republicans want to prevent devastating defense cuts from automatically kicking in two months from now, they’ll have to choke down another round of tax hikes.

And he made it clear any future deficit cuts will have to include still more new taxes. “If Republicans think that I will finish the job of deficit reduction through spending cuts alone,” he said, “then they’ve got another thing coming.”

Nothing Is Certain Except More Debt and Taxes – Whatever ultimately emerges from the fiscal-cliff negotiations over the past 48 hours, the country will survive. But the damage can’t be undone. Taxes are going up for all working Americans. And so is the size of government.Businesses have been waiting to see whether a second Obama administration will encourage the economy. During the fiscal-cliff negotiations, however, the president made clear that his goal isn’t to get business going again but instead to expand government and redistribute income. He offered no real spending cuts and instead used the year-end deadline to divide America into classes—to the point of campaigning on New Year’s Eve against higher earners. Though the president talks about fairness, his policies penalize profit and investment. This hurts aspiring Americans more than it hurts those who have already made it.The deal that emerged from the Senate early Tuesday morning is being sold as a tax cut for the middle class, but the expiration of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday means that working Americans’ take-home pay will drop. The bill reduces the value of tax deductions for upper incomes and, with the new open-ended 3.8% Medicare tax that was enacted under ObamaCare, income-tax rates on families and small business owners earning over $450,000 have been pushed above 44%.

Dems will need new game plan to score tax revenue – The fiscal cliff deal handed Democrats a tax victory years in the making, but it also means the party will need a new playbook for the budget battles that lie ahead.That’s because many Democrats readily acknowledge that they’ve exhausted their ability to raise taxes on the richest Americans by jacking up their rates.The historic tax agreement passed by Congress this week raises rates on top earners from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. Meanwhile, provisions from the 2010 health care law kicked in Jan. 1, increasing rates on investment income from 15 percent to almost 24 percent for the most affluent taxpayers.

Winning these levies was hard enough. With Republicans licking their wounds in the wake of the fiscal cliff deal, Democrats know that politically speaking, there’s virtually no way to keep increasing marginal tax rates.

“This does settle the issue of rates for individuals,” Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) told POLITICO. “That’s good. That certainty and predictability is one of the gains” of the fiscal cliff legislation.

Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, agreed. When asked whether more rate increases are in the offing, he responded, “I don’t foresee that.”

Past the ‘cliff,’ debt ceiling promises a more brutal fight – As a weary Washington assesses the “fiscal cliff” deal, a debt-ceiling showdown looms on the horizon. There are a number of reasons to believe that the standoff — expected sometime in February or March — will be even more difficult to resolve than the last debt-ceiling impasse in the summer of 2011.In the 2011 showdown, House Speaker John Boehner established the principle that every dollar increase in the debt limit would have to be accompanied by a dollar cut in government spending. The final deal allowed for at least $2.1 trillion in debt-limit increases offset by promised spending cuts and did not raise taxes.

McConnell: Fiscal cliff deal not great, but it shields Americans from tax hike – The first day of a new Congress always represents a fresh start. This year, it also presents a perfect opportunity to tackle the single-greatest challenge facing our nation: reining in the out-of-control federal spending that threatens to permanently alter our economy and dim the prospects and opportunities of future generations of Americans.Earlier this week, I helped negotiate an imperfect solution aimed at avoiding the so-called “fiscal cliff.” If I had my way taxes would not have gone up on anyone, but the unavoidable fact was this if we had sat back and done nothing taxes would have gone up dramatically on every single American, and I simply couldn’t allow that to happen.By acting, we’ve shielded more than 99% of taxpayers from a massive tax hike that President Obama was all-too willing to impose. American families and small businesses that would have seen painfully smaller paychecks and profits this month have been spared. Retirement accounts for seniors won’t be whittled down by a dramatic increase in taxes on investment income. And many who’ve spent a lifetime paying taxes on income and savings won’t be slammed with a dramatically higher tax on estates.

Was it a great deal? No. As I said, taxes shouldn’t be going up at all. Just as importantly, the transcendent issue of our time, the spiraling debt, remains completely unaddressed. Yet now that the President has gotten his long-sought tax hike on the “rich,” we can finally turn squarely toward the real problem, which is spending.

Predictably, the President is already claiming that his tax hike on the “rich” isn’t enough. I have news for him: the moment that he and virtually every elected Democrat in Washington signed off on the terms of the current arrangement, it was the last word on taxes. That debate is over. Now the conversation turns to cutting spending on the government programs that are the real source of the nation’s fiscal imbalance. And the upcoming debate on the debt limit is the perfect time to have that discussion.

We simply cannot increase the nation’s borrowing limit without committing to long overdue reforms to spending programs that are the very cause of our debt.

How corporate tax credits got in the ‘cliff’ deal – The “fiscal cliff” legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren’t the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff’s edge — they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week.The Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012, which passed through the Senate Finance Committee in August, was copied and pasted into the fiscal cliff legislation, yielding a victory for biotech companies, wind-turbine-makers, biodiesel producers, film studios — and their lobbyists. So, if you’re wondering how algae subsidies became part of a must-pass package to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff, credit the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s lobbying last summer.

White House eases path to residency for some illegal immigrants – The Obama administration eased the way Wednesday for illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of American citizens to apply for permanent residency, a change that could affect as many as 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants unlawfully in the U.S.A new rule issued by the Department of Homeland Security aims to reduce the time illegal immigrants are separated from their American families while seeking legal status, immigration officials said.Beginning March 4, when the changes go into effect, illegal immigrants who can demonstrate that time apart from an American spouse, child or parent would create “extreme hardship,” can start the application process for a legal visa without leaving the U.S.

Once approved, applicants would be required to leave the U.S. briefly in order to return to their native country and pick up their visa.

Why the Obama tax hikes have only just begun – But what leverage will Obama have to make good on his tax-hike threats? As The Wall Street Journal editorial page notes today, “The President has had unusual leverage over Republicans because he just won re-election and because taxes were going to go up even if they did nothing.”One potential Obama bargaining chip is the sequester, particularly the $500 billion in defense cuts that many GOPers loathe. So perhaps Obama can offer to turn off the defense cuts in exchange for $500 billion from limiting tax breaks for the rich. And then maybe another $300 billion in corporate tax hikes for agreeing to change how Social Security benefits are calculated. Many scenarios are possible. What’s for sure is that the Obama desires vastly higher taxes to pay for his expanded welfare state. Desires and needs them. And it’s now Democrat economic theology that tax rates could return to pre-Reagan levels without hurting growth.Tax hikes? Obama is only just getting started.